Laurent Cohen-Tanugi

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a Paris-based international lawyer, specialising in cross-border mergers and acquisitions and international arbitration, and a member of the Paris and New York Bars.

He was recently appointed by the French government to lead a task force on the future of the European Union’s Lisbon Strategy, ahead of the upcoming French presidency of the EU. He was previously a partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP (2005-2007), senior vice president and general counsel of Sanofi-Synthélabo, a European pharmaceutical group, (2004), and a partner of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton (1991-2003).

He is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure and holds an agrégation in French literature from the University of Paris and a degree from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris. He graduated from the University of Paris Law School in 1981 and received an LL.M. degree from the Harvard Law School in 1982.

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is the author of numerous books, including Le Droit sans l'Etat (PUF, 1985), a comparative essay on the French and American legal and political traditions, prefaced by Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard University; La Métamorphose de la Démocratie (Odile Jacob, 1989), an essay on the changes affecting the French and European democratic cultures since the late sixties; L'Europe en danger (Fayard, 1992), anticipating the current crisis of political Europe; Le Choix de l’Europe (Fayard, 1995), an essay on the future of European unification, and Le Nouvel ordre numérique (Odile Jacob, 1999), a multi-disciplinary analysis of the communications and information technology revolution.

His latest English-language works include An Alliance At Risk, The United States And Europe After September 11 (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2003), exploring the present state and future prospects of transatlantic relations, and The End of Europe? (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005, Volume 84., No. 6), an analysis of the state of the EU following the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitutional treaty. His new book, The Shape of the World to Come, on the geopolitics of globalisation, will be published in the United States by Columbia University Press in the summer of 2008.

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a regular columnist in French newspapers Le Monde and Les Echos, and lectures on a variety of subjects internationally. A director of Notre Europe, a think-tank founded by former EC Commission President Jacques Delors, he is actively involved in European policy-making. He is also a member of the French Academy of Technologies, and a director of several think-tanks, including the Aspen Institute France. A frequent consultant to the French government, he sat on the Commission on Judicial Reform set up by President Chirac in 1997, and on the Commission on the Intangible Economy set up by the French government in 2006. He is also a member of the Policy Advisory Council of the French-American Foundation.

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi teaches a seminar on European affairs at the École normale supérieure in Paris.